I just walked past Mark Rylance

This seems to be the only way I know how to start writing about my abortion.

11th October 2024

Mark Rylance just strolled past me. I was walking out of Simply Fabrics, just off Coldharbour Lane, with an incredibly large plastic bag on my arm full of wool to make kilts. Those giant plastic bags always feel so silly on me because I have such short legs. Like it’s trying to trip me up knocking around my ankles like that. As if the bag knows famous-actor-Mark-Rylance is walking past me in his little green bowler hat, tiny moustache and (incredibly fashionable) cropped bomber. Looking like he’s dressed for a part. We’re similar heights and I have my hair gelled back and I’m wearing my sheepskin. I noticed something a little je-ne-sais-quoi about his face and maybe he did in mine, or perhaps he liked my style (I like to think). Either way, the gaze between us was held and a small nod and a smile was exchanged. I was voice-noting Albert to ask him when he’d be done at the osteopaths; I’ve fixed his jacket and I’d love to take his picture in it. The jacket’s torn elbows are now reinforced with patches of a fabric I made my first kilt with. A scratchy but chic herringbone that’s plugged into the elbows with a beige cotton thread. The thread weaves in and out, sashiko style, of the dusty blue fabric. Dusty blue, or is it dirty - I can’t really tell. Albert saw Mark Rylance too recently, he didn’t specify where, but he’s definitely knocking about in London town at the moment. 

I’ve stapled white fabric to my bedroom floor so that my room now resembles a creche. Or heaven. Or a padded cell. The walls are white and my bed has 5 pillows on it with a variety of vintage pillow cases that I’ve embroidered little notes onto. There's a painting of a red Devil woman that hangs over my bed. And a disposable camera photo that dad took of his face - mewing (although he wouldn’t have known what that was) - with a curly 2 year old Ellie [force] feeding him tea. He’s tanned and chiselled and serious and I’m chubby and curly and shoving a tiny tea party cup into his mouth. Sharing, feeding, offering. Yoshi sat below this today - I shot a film of her singing in my bedroom. Singing her soft and emotional and intimate songs whilst sitting on my bed dressed in my clothes. A red garter top. The one with red straps that hang down over the hips. Soft bamboo jersey with sexy straps to clip your stockings into. Or just wear them hanging down. An angel dressed as a devil. 

For half of the shoot she let me sit in with my cam-corder. Zooming in on her big eyes and pink lips and elegant fingers plucking the strings. The row of houses and blue sky behind her bleached head - the view I look at every morning and every night. In my head, little cartoon Cinderella birds chirped around her head while she sang her hypnotic songs in her silken husky voice. We realised she could do her magic better without me being in the room. An audience makes me shy too. It’s so much easier to perform in your bedroom with no one around. I’m exactly the same when I’m dancing around in my pants. I can post the pictures I take out to the internet for the world to see - arse and tits suggestively turned to the camera. But the thought of being in the room with people watching while I'm performing my enticing rituals to my laptop is too cringey to bear. 

So I set up my camcorder on the shelf and my phone on the tripod on the other side of the room and slunk into the kitchen. There is something so comforting listening to songs being sung by someone you love behind a closed door. When they are under their spell. I spent my childhood hearing my dad strumming away in the kitchen. Boyfriends tinkling and humming tunes into voice memos. My favourite thing to do at the moment is to listen to my neighbours singing together. There’s one teenage boy who strums his songs. There have been times I’ve woken up with Mac Demarco lyrics in my head so vivid, then coming out of my slumber to realise it’s coming from the wall above my pillow.

After we finished recording Yosh and I drove to Clapham - I was off to Brixton to buy my fabric. She was going to see a friend. I’d been feeling a specific date approaching but only on this car journey did I say it out loud. 

“It was this time 2 years ago that I was about to have an abortion.”

“Today??” She replied. 

I couldn’t remember. I scrolled through my camera roll to remind me of the days. As we drove, the green expanse of the park I spent every day of my childhood flashed in my periphery. In the foreground, my eyes flicked through the tiny squares containing the past two years of my life. 

How weird is it to scroll through your life in the images that live on your phone. I was looking at my past self thinking Oh god - bby girl it's going to get so bad before it gets okay again. The selfies. The bras (for work and not for work). The meals. The recipes. The pictures of my gigantic pregnant tits (mostly not for work).  The past loves. The people. The gigs. The pretending to be ok. The babies. The nice times. The bad times. The weird times. More babies. The random dog I owned for a night. The time before it got really bad. 

I was looking for a particular photo. It was a picture I remember taking to send to the person who might have gotten me pregnant. It was the view from my sofa. The big wooden table. The blue packet of crispy m&ms. My cheese plant in the background. Spice the Movie playing on my laptop. Candles flickering. Con doing some drawing on the table in front of me. And a big NHS bag of drugs under the table with all the different kinds of treats that make you feel better. A special abortion day spread - courtesy of gettir and Chelsea and Westminster hospital. Looking through my phone I saw all the dates that were a complete blur in real time. The 17th of October 2022…

____________________________________

17th October 2024 

This week I’ve been ill. A ball of snot. And aches. Eyes weeping. Hot fevers and cold toes. My nose hurts from blowing it. And despite bathing every day (mostly to steam my head holes) my hair looks like a bird's nest tied into the most pathetic bun on top of my head. On Monday I was skin and bones from doing too much dancing and not enough eating. Today I’m full and soft again from snacking my way through the cold. Mum brought me round a care package on Tuesday. She feels really bad about the last time I was ill and home alone - let’s just say I wasted away and have never felt that deliriously close to death. The care package was legit. Minestrone with alphabetti spaghetti - homemade. Chicken lime - a family special. Morello cherry yogurt. An orange. Two lemons. Earl grey tea bags. A 150g hello fresh sticky jasmine rice. Some more questionable gifts - some sloe gin with a “Merry Christmas to the Domoney’s” label - sticky and sampled. Half a bottle of French red wine vinegar. Some surgery scissors from work - for my sewing. I know there were more but this memory game has proven to be too much for my 4-day-in-bed rotten brain. 

So the week has been a haze of New Girl (don’t judge me - season 1 & 2 are funny), Mermaids (Cher, Winona, Christina Ricci - laugh, look, beauty), Broey Deschanel (film critique videos on Youtube), Naima Bock’s new album (cry cry sob beauty), Boy’s Don’t Cry (very very very very cry but good but very heartbreaking), my bath, Annie Ernaux and Miranda July interviews on YouTube, how water and lemons, more bed, bit of mending, mostly bed. But today - I got dressed (and washed!). And I hoovered. And I’m out of the house. To be quite honest, this week has been quietly reminiscent of this time two years ago. The week I was preparing myself to alter the path of my future, with medical help. The decision making. The day. The aftermath. The white sheets. The blood the blood the blood. The smells. The cursed white towel robe. The fatigue. The aches. So I thought, maybe while my head was still full of snot but also a bit clearer than before, I would try and write about the days leading up to and after my abortion. Because, I don’t know… Annie Ernaux says something like: to write is to fight forgetting. And I almost forgot about all those days. And we as a society (or maybe it’s just me) do stupid shit and then forget - and then do the stupid shit again. I think Annie Ernaux puts it way more succinctly and references wars - how we forget how horrific wars are, because as soon as one is over another often begins. This is particularly poignant right now as we watched, just yesterday, Sha’ban al-Dalou burn alive while attached to his IV drip at al-’Asqua’s Martyrs Hospital in Gaza. God rest his soul - I’m not even a religious person but with the things we’ve been seeing on our phones every day for the past year, surely there must be something else if this is hell that some people have to live in. There must be something else. 

So, I've decided it’s not self-indulgent. And it’s not gratuitous. Writing can stop us forgetting so that we can remember how to be better equipped to protect each other in the future. And with the help of the pictures on my iPhone - here is the tale of my terminated pregnancy… 

_______________________

October 2022 

I'd been going to the studio every day. Making the commute across London to sew my pants and bras and skirts and things. The haze of summer was ending and I was in love and also in lust. What a lucky girl! A stable beautiful love built on tiny daily rituals of beauty. A relationship that had grown out of years of generous obsessive friendship and drunken kisses. A love that knew my thoughts before I had even dreamt them, or at least prompted me to think them. And then one lust that was a little bit forbidden and obviously enticing. A lust that couldn’t be satiated because of an ocean separating us, making it even more alluring. 

The temperatures were dropping and I was the sleepiest and hungriest girl alive. I woke up ravenous. I had third helpings of roasted veg and special green sauce. I craved monster munch and nice and spicy Nik Naks and toast with butter and butter and salt and more butter. My tits were huge but for some reason I thought it was because I was happy and horny. Funny how being in a whirlwind could make me so quickly forget the stone I had lost from my summer festivalling. 

5th October 2022

We were going to see Horsey at Village Underground. My brother was so gassed - he loves to slut drop and nod along to the Horsey boys. One moment I was nursing a half pint of Guinness at the Old Blue Last with Georgie and the next moment I was crouched down, head in hands amongst the trainers and boots, trying not to vomit while Archy Marshall drawled over their last song. I’d ordered a red wine at Village Underground. I thought I was hacking the corrupt system of the £7 330ml can of IPA (eurgh). The temperatures outside were dropping, summer was over, a small vin rouge would be the perfect accompaniment to tonight’s soiree. But it was sour and heavy. My self-inflicted obligation to FINISH THE DRINK I’d spent money on caused me to gag and splutter. I sipped through the waves of nausea. It was so hot. Unbearably so. The tall ceilings of Village Underground were doing nothing to create an airflow and everyone had started dressing in their winter coats again. The bros that go and bop along to Horsey (god bless them all) were getting too close to my sticky sweaty skin and I couldn’t think of anything better than crawling up in a ball on the floor and having a little sick into my cup. 

The yawns were coming thick and fast. They were making me feel claustrophobic. You can’t breathe or swallow when those yawns get in your insides. I was burnt out from partying and my body had had enough (so I thought). I was gutted. So gutted that my big summer had fucked up this really nice time I was having with my love and my brother and my sister in law. None of us knew that there was a reason I was having a sicky turn. There’s a Florence Welch quote that has always stuck with me from an interview she did after she got sober. She was basically saying that you’re not good at drinking or taking drugs - you basically have a problem. I always prided myself on how much I could drink and take drugs, the cycle of taking drugs so I could drink more, or drink so I could take drugs and not feel weird. Child of an alcoholic and maybe growing up a bit too early, I was always good at finding the - balance - …. I remember thinking at that particular moment of feeling so wrong in my body - how have I done my maths wrong I’ve barely drank anything … but this wine is literally poisoning me. Rather than tuning into my body and really listening, I dismissed it as a result of one too many parties this summer - if I had really listened I might have clocked a little sooner. 

6th October 2022 

Tattoo day! I’d been coveting Oski’s tattoos for years from his instagram. I’d managed to bag myself a last minute spot to go get inked. I would go on my way to the studio; morning tat, afternoon stuüd, evening dinner with Con. I skipped down Whitechapel road, fizzy with pre-body-modification teenage thrill. Down a back alley and up some stairs I found the studio - an attic perfect for a sickly family member of Violet, Klaud and Sunny Baudelaire to live in. There were beautiful wooden floorboards just like the Victorian East Coast Kent houses we browsed while (living in fantasy land and..) looking for a future life. It was a long top floor room of an artist studios space and the roof was sloped on either side - the centre of the attic room was perfect for all the tall humans. Like a church or a cottage. On the left side, there was a huge fish tank. There was no water in it, just lots of foliage and trinkets and a mouldy taxidermy piranha. On the other side of the room lay the Tetris blocks of tattoo tables lining the smaller walls. 

I sat down and Oski offered me a cup of tea while I decided what I was going to get. I spent 20 minutes flicking through the iPad drawings and narrowed it down to a blobby flower and a bird. We decided to start on the bird and if we had time we could do a flower.  We spoke about our ancestors from foreign lands and people we knew in London. And he gave me a sweet tattoo that I still love today. A little bird in watermelon red. A negative space square. Inside the square lives a seabird. A nod to my time in Brighton maybe? My blood in Brighton. If you look at her the other way round though, she could be a tulip. A cute edition to my anaemic cooked-spaghetti arms. All wrapped up in a second skin, I skipped back out into the brighton London day with the adrenaline of new ink and blood flowing on my skin. 

Back down the metal stairs. Cross the road. Headed down towards Whitechapel station.  

Past the stalls. The fruit. The meat shop. The mosque. 

My head was spinning. My feet, so heavy. 

Oh shit is that a cycle lane. I need to sit down. 

Blur blur, sky sky, stumble in my boots. Con’s boots. 

I woke up on the floor

 - thinking about it now - this was not the first time I’d fainted. 

A week before mum and I had been in ChinaTown eating dim sum together at Wong Kei’s. It was a random evening actually - maybe we went to the theatre? Why else would we be listening to the cheesy buskers and eating Shanghai dumplings on a weeknight? I introduced her to the Chinese custard waffle fish from the shop on the corner that day - the ones Jess introduced me to on a rambling Soho day in the summer. 4 for a pound? That doesn’t sound like today's prices but for the story maybe it works. On the way home from Soho, the Northern line was chocca (as per). I’d offered my seat to someone when I suddenly started to feel faint. The Northern line suits and families were in their own worlds and I slid my sweaty back down against the tube doors to try and get some cooler air at everyone's feet. Mum commented how white I was and tried to find me a seat and I almost blacked out there on the tube floor. It weirdly didn’t faze either of us - me being the more sickly duckling out of her three. 

I can’t remember the journey down to Woolwich that day but I’m sure it was smooth - just a few stops on that sweet sweet purple carriageway. When I got in, I told Ella I needed to lie down. I slumped onto Jess’s orange pull out sofa, covered myself with our disgusting paint splattered, dust covered studio fleece and fell into a deep slumber. When I woke up Ella looked up at me from her lamp desk. Not a desk with a lamp on it but a desk where she made all her lamps from wood and glass and collages out of old plastic bags. We did a little debrief about how sleepy and grumpy and hungry I was. How many of Sleeping Beauty’s dwarves are a symptom of pregnancy? 

She asked me the question that might have been in the back of my brain (hello my names Ellie - i'm an anxious avoidant- I don't check my bank balance - I don't talk about my fears and needs - I couldn’t tell you what I think I might need to make my life nicer). 

‘El could you be pregnant?’. - Babe no I literally only sleep with one woman - apart from the time that I slept with one boy recently but that's too recent unless it was that other time - that first first time. Wait no literally no there's no way. No way. 

She googled the symptoms of pregnancy and she started nodding her head and looking at me with her big grey eyes. You’d think by 28 you’d be able to know without having to ask Google but here we are. I dismissed it and decided to think about it later. We mopped the studio floors and did a big clean. Lamp making and sewing in the same space requires frequent deep cleans to avoid splinters in your knickers.. I texted Con that I was a bit worried about the fact that my tits were huge and my pink bra was tight. The month before while we had been lounging on the grass in front of our tent at We Out Here Festival we’d commented on how silly my baggy bra was…. I'd partied a lot that summer and I’d gotten a lot smaller.

We went to the pub after the studio. We talked about the what ifs and the what-nots. The hypothetical it could be amazing! The other stuff… The scary stuff. I like my life right now. I have no money. I have a complicated relationship structure, not that I wouldn’t have anyone around - I have so many people to help but it’s too scary, too real. We had a pint. Shivering in the Antelope garden, the temperature had dropped. Nothing was real. This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. I had polycystic ovaries and I was living my life as a wlw wife. I’d only just begun this beautiful path. I wasn’t ready. 

Con coaxed me home. Now? We had tests at home. Just go wee in the plastic pot and stick the little stick in there. Kindly, patiently, she made a safe space for me to deal with whatever crossroads that was about to slap us in the face. Once we know, we know - is what they say or something. I weed in the cup. The plastic heated up as my cup filled. I managed to stop mid flow and remove the cup so it didn’t fill it above the ‘MAX’ line. Maximum wee. I finished and went back into the kitchen and sat on the floor with my head in Con’s lap. I sipped 5 big sips of wine. 

I couldn’t look. Con you look. She looks and gives me a look. ‘No wait’ she says and turns her back towards the little cup of wee, unsure - not wanting to give me the wrong look incase her eyes deceived her. ‘No ok’..  I look. And there it was. Two little stripes of red - it’s never a good thing  - or it hadn’t been for us for the past couple years. A positive covid test - a vampire bite - spots - a rash - no no no a positive pregnancy test. I felt something boil up from my insides. An energy of catastrophe. A wail that I hadn’t really felt since I found my dad, dead, years before. Disbelief. I couldn’t control the noises that came out of me. I wept and wailed and held onto Con. This pain and confusion wasn’t quite like the pain from dad though - this one was bitter sweet. My body had tricked me - it had taken away my periods for years. Covered my ovaries in cysts and convinced me that I couldn’t have children. One of the things that I think I am destined to do on this planet. Something I think I’d be truly fucking good at. But no, it had crept up on me and done me dirty. I wept and Con stroked my hair and wiped my tears and held my sinking body. I hadn’t admitted to myself that this was even more complex than we first imagined. We did some maths and looked at the calendar. All the times I’d slept with a man unprotected in recent months. But the thing I hadn’t admitted to myself, let alone Con, is that I’d slept with two people that weekend. And that was that. There was no way of knowing. And there it was. The bright red lines, in the harshness of our new surgically bright bathroom light, sat next to the toilet. 

That night we called Noah round for some help - it was an emergency. He arrived sheepish, with a four pack of Asahi’s, not knowing what he was getting himself into - I don’t usually call my brother round on a weeknight. We discussed all the possibilities while I quietly wept at the results of my terribly timed slutty August. It’s nice to have a boy’s perspective, albeit my brothers (maybe that's even better than any other man’s perspective..). Anyway I wept, we laughed, we drank. The next day I woke up delirious, thinking I’d dreamt it all. 

What followed next was a haze. We ran a life drawing event - I told Cubs; we discussed the fork in the road of life. I saw my friends who had kids, many of whom were single mothers, who assured me that either path I decided would be right and good. No one ever put any pressure on me. My mum might have said when I revealed to her I didn’t know who got me pregnant ‘well that’s a bit complicated’. But within the week I'd made a decision.

I’d been to Brighton that week to see all my family - my sister’s tiny kids, my wee baby cousins and thought god I could really do this right now aswell - but there was something missing. It wasn’t right. The right time. God, I would have loved to bring up my children at the same time as my sister but it just wasn’t right. 

Mum set up my abortion, bless her. What are mummies for…especially gynaecologist mothers. We went to the hospital, my bladder full, and I got my scan. It wasn’t completely real until the blob was seen. The sonographer was sweet and gentle. They knew I was a particular doctor's daughter. I don't know if that changes things but I felt a bit non-anonymous if that makes sense. As the gentle fawn-like woman went to turn the screen to me I told Con I couldn’t look - can you look?  She looked at the screen of squiggly worms and nonsense for me. She knows more than me if it was real. Baby blob Domoney. Thank God for this woman, I thought. 

So we went home with a big bag of drugs and it took me another 5 days or so to actually start the process. I don’t know if I was still deciding whether or not to go along with the pregnancy but there were a lot of things going on in my life that maybe it felt too overwhelming. I think there was a certain amount of grief too. Like maybe I’d done so much death in my twenties that now I was pregnant and 28, I should end the decade with a bit of new life. A gift from my - so rudely departed from this world - father. The two men that could have impregnated me gave me kind of Martin energy - in a Peter Pan, can’t grow up kind of way. But that wasn’t enough to have a baby. I didn’t want to ever do something if I wasn’t sure I was certain, you know…. 

I was at the end of the timeline of being able to do the procedure at home. After 10 weeks  you have to do it surgically. The more time you leave it - the more painful and gross and traumatic it is apparently. 

17th October 2022

So we named a day. We booked it off. Everyone was on call. Con had got, literally, all the supplies. The sweeties, the snacks, the Ellie-coded treats, the painkillers, the mega sanitary towels, the cosies, phones to the side. The first pill had been taken the day before; mifepristone. This stops the pregnancy by blocking progesterone, which without, the pregnancy cannot continue. Then, some many hours later, it was time to take misoprostol. This pill basically generates a miscarriage. The womb contracts and creates cramping and bleeding. I took the pill. And for many hours sat waiting. Wrapped up in swaiths of woollen blankets watching Friends reruns I was surprised I felt so fine. Until it hit me. Jesus Christ I’ve never felt pain like it, and I get horrendous period pains. I was dosed up on codeine but when those cramps came I felt like I was exorcising a demon. I hugged my knees into my chest. No matter how hard I pushed them through my breasts past my spine down through the sofa, nothing could relieve the devil that was scraping my insides. I imagine, like childbirth, evolutionarily your body makes you forget these things, these pains. Even now I can see myself in a bird eye view but I can’t summon the feeling with words in my brain. I crawled to the bathroom because the pain was too much and vomited. Never have I ever been physically sick from pain. Truly like a curse upon the body. I lay on the bathroom floor between the bath and the toilet. Staring at the cupboard shivering and rocking with intense waves of nausea and shooting shocks from my pelvis to my throat. Con slotted a towel under my head and a flannel to my cheek. I listened through gritted teeth and wet lips as she called my mum. She was at work but she was going to bring round a suppository for the pain (up the butt always does better for pain drugs, maybe any drugs). It was too late by the time she arrived. The big pain hounds were already been and gone. They’d barked, woken everyone up, and then fucked off. 

The day slipped into evening. A glass of wine had been drunk. The telly had gotten too much and been switched off. The American sitcoms too unlike anything that was happening in my reality to really give me any solace to the pain I was in. 

Then the constant trips to the toilet to change my sanitary pad. Every time I sat on the loo a glob of blood and body tissue fell out of me. I can still smell that iron-y blood smell, more intense than period. I’m not sure if it was my chaos brain but that night I had a shower and something came out of me. My shower was candlelit that night, which is often the way in our little yellow bathroom. I looked down and saw a little inch wide bean shape wrapped in globules of blood. I couldn’t look at it - which is surprising for someone who is quite entranced by blood and guts, and my body, and other peoples bodies, and gross things. But this was one step too far. I called Con in and she made it disappear somehow. 

I returned to the sofa and spent the next few hours wrapped up in a quiet ball with Con, candles flickering, cheese plant, m&m crispies and my bag of drugs. I took my phone out and sent the photo. The day was over, it was done. 

For the next two and a half months I floated through life in a strange haze of depression and confusion. I was glad I terminated my pregnancy, god forbid feeling like this WHILST growing a baby or having a baby, jesus no… but nothing prepared me for how alone I felt. Like I was enacting life in a simulation. To be quite honest, it felt a lot like grief. I was grieving a life that I almost lived. A person I almost met. And after almost a decade of that grief being channeled towards my father’s suicide it felt quite aimless. Because this grief was about something hypothetical. Something in my imagination. It created a whirlwind of hopelessness within me. Nothing was special. Nothing was exciting. Everything was painful. I then got dumped by one person. Then a very painfully numb Christmas and 29th birthday happened. And then I ended things with someone I loved very much. 6 months later I woke up from a slumber -  I was on antidepressants, living alone, confused as hell. It was my Saturn return. And it had burnt everything to a crisp. 

Here I am two years later writing it out. Building up from the flames. Writing the stories and learning from pesky Saturn’s chaos. Feels cheap and cheeky to blame my inability to USE PROTECTION on the planets but may we all take a lesson from this … (penis owners especially).

I want to clarify how extremely lucky I feel to be able to access abortion care. I’m so privileged for this to be something that I have access to and in no second do I want anyone to take the nuances and complexities of abortion and its aftermath to start preaching the anti-choice bullshit. I never would have expected to feel like I did being staunchly pro-choice my whole life. Maybe writing about this is my way of breaking through how alone I felt and just a note that if anyone else is feeling like that too it's ok and it will get better. 

And it's a weird time to be a person in the world right now.

So make the art. Hug the person. Tell them you love them. 

Love your friends and don’t be scared to love them as much as you would love a romantic partner. 

Call your mum, if you have one, call your dad, if you have one. Go see your grandma if you’re lucky enough to have one OR TWO or THREE! 

And FREE PALESTINE till I die.